


do i have to hit you over the head with it?

by patrokla



Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Angst, Child Abuse, Episode: s01e06 Smells Like Teen Spirit, M/M, a brief and terrible history of alex manes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-11-06 23:53:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17949578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patrokla/pseuds/patrokla
Summary: Alex is seven when he first hears the sound of a bone breaking.





	do i have to hit you over the head with it?

**Author's Note:**

> Some post-1x06 awfulness, as though the episode weren't sad enough.
> 
> Warnings for: graphic depictions of physical child abuse (of Michael, as shown in the episode, and of Alex, as imagined by me). 
> 
> Title from the Mountain Goats "World Cylinder."

Alex is seven when he first hears the sound of a bone breaking.  
  
It’s his brother Colin, the second oldest, who accidentally slams a car door shut on his own fingers. The snap is audible over Colin’s shout, and Alex still remembers the way his mother had chipped a coffee mug, dropping it back into the sink as she ran outside. Colin had come back from the hospital with a cast that went up to his elbow, and Alex had drawn a bright pink heart on it in permanent marker. His mother thought it was sweet. His father had narrowed his eyes.  
  
Later, Alex wonders if the heart was the start of Jesse Manes’ suspicions about his son. It would be a few more years before Alex began to have his own suspicions.  
  
—  
  
Alex is nine when he first breaks one of his own bones, or rather, when one of his own bones is broken. The memory itself is fuzzy, although the pain remains crystal clear after two decades. His parents were fighting, something they did more and more as Alex got older, and he’d tried to get in the middle. It was a stupid kid move, the kind of move you make when you still think appealing to your own innocence will stop someone from hurting you.  
  
He remembers his father shoving him out of the way, and his leg getting caught on - something? The leg of a table? A misplaced backpack? He’d fallen backwards, and then that familiar snap came, magnified by Alex’s ears, and his mother screamed, and his father turned away.  
  
It’s a clean break that heals quickly. Alex doodles on his own cast. His father watches him.  
  
—  
  
Alex is eighteen when his father breaks Michael’s hand. It’s the opposite of a clean break. Alex knows that as soon as he hears the nauseating squelch of bone and tendon and flesh being smashed by the hammer. The sharp snap of his and Colin’s injuries are entirely absent, or maybe just drowned out by Michael’s yelling and Alex’s desperate pleading and the ringing in his ears as Jesse Manes raises the hammer again, considering.  
  
“Please, please don’t,” Alex hears himself beg, and his father lets Michael fall to the floor. When he turns to face Alex, there’s nothing but cold hatred in his eyes.  
  
“Get inside the house,” his father orders. His knuckles are white around the hammer’s haft.  
  
Alex doesn’t dare look at Michael. He lets his father grab the collar of his shirt and drag him out of the shed and into the house.  
  
No bones are broken in the beating that ensues. His body cowers on the kitchen floor, but the rest of him is with Michael, urging him to get up from the floor of the shed and go away, away, away, to somewhere safe.  
  
—  
  
Alex is eighteen when he realizes that not every broken bone heals straight. He leaves before the bloodied bandages that Michael wraps around his hand come off, but he knows from the lack of a cast, from the way Michael holds his arm, from the fact that Michael has no first aid supplies or any place more hygienic to clean his wounds than a high school bathroom - he knows that Michael’s hand won’t heal right.  
  
Michael sometimes watches him at school, but Alex feels the phantom gaze of his father more strongly. He doesn’t return the looks. At home, his father alternates between disgust and anger. He tears the posters and pictures down from the walls of the tool shed, and makes Alex clean the blood off of the table and floor. Alex sleeps in his bed. Michael sleeps in the bed of his truck. The tool shed gains a padlock.  
  
Alex is eighteen and a day away from graduation when he scrubs the nail polish off of his fingers for the last time, and goes to enlist in the Air Force. At graduation, he accidentally meets Michael’s eyes for the first time in weeks.  
  
The weight of his father’s gaze is heavier. Alex looks away.

**Author's Note:**

> don’t like going to the doctor.  
> i don't like looking at the mirror.  
> i like looking out the window,  
> watching the waves break.  
> do i have to hit you over the head with it?  
> do i have to hit you over the head with it?
> 
> carry me down to the water  
> where i used to play when i was five.  
> let me go, let me go down to the water.  
> don't bring me back alive.  
> do i have to hit you over the head with it?  
> do i have to hit you over the head with it?
> 
> \- the Mountain Goats, "World Cylinder"


End file.
